More like ..... I own the sugar plantation so I can use as much sugar as I want .... I can dump so much sugar into my lemon flavored water that it will be like selling crack to children. Once they're hooked, these kids will beg their parents to buy my stuff for cheap .... for the rest of their lives!
The sugar laden crap I get them hooked on also causes diabetes which is why I also own the diabetes medication pharmaceutical where these kids will buy their drugs as diabetic adults.
I'll make money on these dumb kids through every stage of their miserable lives.
Oh and I fired the kids who started the stand.
…and paid off the zoning commission to shut down the others, guaranteeing mine is the only legal swill in town.
Competitions end. And when competitions end in a world where everything is "run like a business," the winners are not handed medals, but monopolies.
They are handed an extinction. Thanks for making a bunch of useless piles of paper.
which is why we need anti piss-in-lemonade laws and limits on how much water there can be for a given number of lemons.
we don't need to remove capitalism, instead we can restrain it from harming people
Part of me agrees with you. The other part of me knows how well capitalism can pivot so much quicker than laws can be made to curtail the bad practices, that the system seems to be the issue. Maybe the government is the issue too, but it's a lot of bad faith companies that ruins the bunch. Forward thinking and progressive thinking with quick measured action could do it, but most people who are elected aren't capable of that or are too compromised to make anything work.
we don't need to remove capitalism, instead we can restrain it from harming people
That's what we've been telling ourselves for almost 200 years, and yet we are as we are...
Enshittification
Trying to explain this to people I know is nearly impossible. They always think "but when I'm rich I want all the money and no regulation!" Well guess what you work at Walmart and will never be rich so I guess let yourself get endlessly exploited then. There is no ethical billionaire. Maybe not even millionaire tbh.
As things are, every Millennial and anyone in a later generation is going to have to be a millionaire to retire to a reasonable level of comfort. It could also be true that there are no ethical millionaires. Where does that leave us?
It's not that hard to be a millionaire by retirement if you have a decently good paying job. Assuming you're making $84k a year (good money, but hardly "capitalist pig" level) and invest 6% of your income every year in your retirement account (~$5k a year) at a roughly 7% average interest rate (historical stock market average) for 40 years that gets you to $1mil.
Very true
ik a few ethical millionares
That was honestly pretty nice of the first guy to not use piss.
So we must buy his because he’s the lesser of two evils! That will fix the lemonade industry
Whew. I'm glad we solved that.
Shout out to the $8 quart of ice water with half a lemon in it sold as "lemonade" at last year's ren faire. Though I did get lemon-flavored melted ice for the next few hours out of the deal.
You're just lucky they didn't sell you piss. Alternatively, you missed out on an "opportunity in the market" by not selling your lemonade piss.
Only $8 for a quart of water? Pretty sure the one I went to charged that much for about half as much.
Every capitalist wants to invest as little and profit as much as possible.
- A history of the world in seven cheap things (p.21)
Race to the bottom vs. race to the top. Both are happening. Some are probably competing for most delicious lemonade, but only these two capitalists can afford it and the rest of us drink their piss. The idea of competition in order to race to the top is not a bad idea, and can be usefull in some contexts. It's just that the race to the bottom is usually omitted, or presented as a positive rather than a negative. The idea being something like:
capitalism leads to good things, capitalism leads to people drinking piss, ergo people drinking piss is a good thing.
It should be "I used water, corn syrup, and yellow dye #65“ VS "I used piss." Only "organics" use some of the real stuff, with some "natural" flavors.
Recent willy Wonka movie did a great job with this
